Troops serving in DRC cannot vote

Soldiers serving with the Namibian intervention force in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) will not be able to vote in next week’s presidential and parliamentary elections, government officials told IRIN on Thursday.

Joram Rukambe, director of the Electoral Commission of Namibia said the ministries of defence and foreign affairs had found that setting up polling stations for soldiers in Congo was “not feasible”.

“All factors were considered ranging from security in the Congo to the fact that many soldiers simply do not have voter registration cards, so it will not be possible for them to vote,” he said.

The Namibian government has repeatedly declined to state how many of its troops are serving in Congo with allied forces from Angola and Zimbabwe which intervened to stop President Laurent-Desire Kabila being overthrown by Ugandan and Rwandan-backed rebels. There have been no official figures on the number of casualties or the cost of the Namibian deployment.

“The government is keeping these figures a holy secret,” said Ben Ulenga, the former ambassador to Britain, who broke away from the government earlier this year to establish a new opposition party called the Party of Democrats (CoD).

“We surmise that they are deploying up to 3,000 men along the front lines, men who would be extremely vulnerable should the fighting resume. The real reason of course is that the government rightly fears that they would not vote for SWAPO anyway,” Ulenga said referring to the ruling Southwest Africa Peoples Organisation led by President Sam Nujoma.

An estimated 847,000 voters go to the polls on 30 November and 1 December to elect a new 72-seat parliament and president. The DRC deployment has been seized by opposition parties as platform on which to attack the Nujoma administration.